In this tutorial series we’re going to explore the MERN stack by building a real-world application from start to finish. The MERN stack consists of the following technologies:

Node.js: Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js brings JavaScript to the server
MongoDB: A document-based open source database
Express: A Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js
React: A JavaScript front-end library for building user interfaces

The MERN stack is very similar to the popular MEAN stack. The only difference here is that the MEAN stack is making use of Angular to build the front-end web application and the MERN stack is using React instead.

The application we’ll be building in this tutorial series is a simple To-Do application. By using this example it’s possible to demonstrate how to build a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) application from scratch by using the MERN stack!

In this first part of this series we’re going to complete the setup the React project for building the front-end part of the MERN stack sample application. In the next part we’re going to continue with implementing the Node.js / Express server.